A Gentleman’s view.

The prolonged procedure of picking a Republican presidential candidate just gets nastier and nastier. One man maligns another; the victim viciously bites back. And everybody piles on President Obama.

There is more slime being slung back and forth among candidates today than in Ghostbusters II. Maybe we should just rename the whole thing the Slimary Process.

In Florida, for instance, Mitt Romney approves a TV ad accusing Newt Gingrich of influence peddling: “While Florida families lost everything in the housing crisis, Newt Gingrich cashed in,” the message says. “Gingrich was paid over $1.6 million by the scandal-ridden agency that helped create the crisis.”

Newt Gingrich, meanwhile, posts an ad on his YouTube channel mashing Mitt Romney: “What kind of man would mislead, distort and deceive just to win an election?” the voiceover asks as Romney appears on the screen. “This man would.”

New research from consulting firm Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group shows that 92 percent of all political TV ads aired in Florida over the past week were negative, Politico reports.

Driving around Florida for RealClearPolitics, reporter Erin McPike was exposed to a plethora of impolitic political ads. “They are all very nasty,” she told MSNBC recently. “And people keep telling me they think this is the nastiest race they have seen down here.”

Sarcasm, Snarkiness And Sliming

Primary season has taken on a noticeably negative chill because “partisan polarization has grown more frenzied in recent years,” explains Bruce Miroff, a political science professor at State University of New York, Albany. “Anger is especially rampant on the Republican side — not that there is an absence of it on the Democratic side — so much so that in recent debates the winner has been the angry aggressor.” Most often that has been Gingrich, Miroff points out, but in Florida, Romney has gone on the offensive.

In previous years, the attacks that primary candidates made on their rivals “were about flaws like inexperience, opportunism or unelectability,” Miroff says. “In this Republican season, the attacks have escalated to charges of lying, shilling for despised interests — for example Freddie Mac — being a ‘vulture’ capitalist, et cetera.”

And on top of that, he adds, President Obama has been characterized as a socialist and as un-American.

The prolonged process this year is made even more messy by the judicially sanctioned political action committees known as superPACs. The superPAC is able to raise vast amounts of funds for a candidate and run ads that attack the candidate’s opponent, thereby keeping the candidate himself from getting his hands dirty.

Also, there is arguably in contemporary America more of an appetite than ever for — and acceptance of — sarcasm, snarkiness and, yes, sliming.

“In sum,” Miroff says, “this has been a more mean-spirited primary season than in the recent past.” It is, he says, “a reflection of the mean-spirited tone that now pervades much of American politics.”

‘Where’s The Beef?’

Sure, there have been malodorous moments in primaries past.

Michael Smith, a political scientist at Emporia State University in Kansas, recalls that antics used against John McCain in the 2000 Republican primaries included aggressive “push polling” — negative campaign calls disguised as phone surveys — and unsubstantiated allegations that McCain had an illegitimate child.

Other examples, according to David J. Menefee-Libey, a politics professor at California’s Pomona College and author of The Triumph of Campaign-Centered Politics, include the 1976 Republican primaries when “Gov. Ronald Reagan and his proxies were only a bit less caustic in their challenge of President Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination.”

“Four years later, in turn, George H.W. Bush essentially called Reagan an economic idiot with his ‘voodoo economics’ remark. Vice President Walter Mondale was openly contemptuous of Sen. Gary Hart in 1984 when he recounted Hart’s legislative record and, echoing a popular Wendy’s commercial of the day, asked ‘Where’s the beef?’ ” Menefee-Libey says.

And, he adds, do not forget the 2008 election “and the endless nastiness between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.”

That last example illustrates the possibilities of mending political fences. Obama and Clinton, now secretary of state, have worked together for several years.

The Beating Goes On

But in 2012, the beat — and the beating — goes on. Ron Paul runs an ad calling out Gingrich for “serial hypocrisy.” A Rick Santorum ad says Romney is more liberal on social issues than Ted Kennedy.

In the “Florida Families” TV spot, Romney says “D.C. insider” Gingrich was sanctioned for ethics violations then “resigned from Congress in disgrace.”

Meanwhile, another ad from Gingrich lambastes Romney. “Massachusetts moderate Mitt Romney,” the voiceover intones. “He can’t be trusted.”

According to a just-released poll from Suffolk University, some 37 percent of likely Republican voters in Florida said Gingrich has run the most negative campaign, while 31 percent pointed to Romney.

The question, of course, is whether the Republican candidates are belittling each other in ways that will only help Obama get re-elected. And, if several candidates decide to stay in the race, the slime could get slimier.

But Menefee-Libey puts the contemporary contretemps in some perspective. He harkens back to 1968 and Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s criticism of the Vietnam War stance of his fellow Minnesotan, Vice President Hubert Humphrey. “The Democratic nomination process that year nearly collapsed amid cataclysmic violence in Los Angeles and Chicago,” Menefee-Libey says, and what is happening this year is nothing compared to that.

The Republicans Who Would Be President By AnnW

The Democrats Who Unleashed Wall Street and Got Away With It

That Lawrence Summers, a president emeritus of Harvard, is a consummate distorter of fact and logic is not a revelation. That he and Bill Clinton, the president he served as treasury secretary, can still get away with disclaiming responsibility for our financial meltdown is an insult to reason.

Yet, there they go again. Clinton is presented, in a fawning cover story in the current edition of Esquire magazine, as “Someone we can all agree on. … Even his staunchest enemies now regard his presidency as the good old days.” In a softball interview, Clinton is once again allowed to pass himself off as a job creator without noting the subsequent loss of jobs resulting from the collapse of the housing derivatives bubble that his financial deregulatory policies promoted.

At least Summers, in a testier interview by British journalist Krishnan Guru-Murthy of Channel 4 News, was asked some tough questions about his responsibility as Clinton’s treasury secretary for the financial collapse that occurred some years later. He, like Clinton, still defends the reversal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, a 1999 repeal that destroyed the wall between investment and commercial banking put into place by Franklin Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression.

“I think the evidence is that I am right about that. If you look at the big players, Lehman and Bear Stearns were both standalone investment banks,” Summers replied, referring to two investment banks allowed to fold. Summers is very good at obscuring the obvious truth—that the too-big-to-fail banks, made legal by Clinton-era deregulation, required taxpayer bailouts.

The point of Glass-Steagall was to prevent jeopardizing commercial banks holding the savings of average citizens. Summers knows full well that the passage of the repeal of Glass-Steagall was pushed initially by Citigroup, a mammoth merger of investment and commercial banking that create the largest financial institution in the world, an institution that eventually had to be bailed out with taxpayer funds to avoid economic disaster for millions of ordinary Americans. He also knows that Citigroup—where Robert Rubin, who preceded Summers as Clinton’s treasury secretary, played leading roles during a critical time—specialized in precisely the mortgage and other debt packages and insurance scams that were the source of America’s economic crisis.

Even Clinton, in a rare moment of honest appraisal of his record, conceded that his signing of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), legalizing those credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations, was based on bad advice. That advice would have had to come from Summers, his point man pushing the CFMA legislation, which Clinton signed into law during his lame-duck days.

When the British interviewer reminded him of Clinton’s comment, Summers, as is his style, simply bristled: “Again, you make everything so simple, when in fact it’s complicated. Would it have been better if the whole financial reform legislation had passed in 1999, or 1998, or 1992? Yes, of course it would have been better. But … at the time Bill Clinton was president, there essentially were no credit default swaps. So the issue that became a serious problem really wasn’t an issue that was on the horizon.”

That is a lie. Credit default swaps had been sold at least since 1991, and collateralized debt obligations of all sorts quickly became the rage during the Clinton years. Summers surely remembers that Brooksley Born, the legal expert on such matters that Clinton appointed to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), warned about the ballooning danger of those unregulated derivatives. Born, who served with Summers as one of four members of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, tried repeatedly and in vain to get her colleagues to act. When her pleas fell on deaf ears she issued a “concept release” calling attention to an unregulated derivatives market that was even then spiraling out of control.

The CFMA legislation that Summers pushed and Clinton signed was a specific rebuke to Born’s efforts. As Summers testified at the time before a Senate committee: “As you know, Mr. Chairman, the CFTC’s recent concept release has been a matter of great concern, not merely to Treasury, but to all those with an interest in the OTC [over-the-counter] derivatives market. In our view, the Release has cast the shadow of regulatory uncertainty over an otherwise thriving market—raising risks for stability and competitiveness of American derivative trading. We believe it quite important that the doubts be eliminated.”

Those doubts were eliminated by the new law exempting all of that troubling OTC derivatives trading from all existing regulations and regulatory agencies. Summers argued in his congressional testimony that there was no reason for any government regulation of what turned out to be tens of trillions of dollars in toxic assets:

“First, the parties to these kinds of contracts are largely sophisticated financial institutions that would appear to be eminently capable of protecting themselves from fraud and counterparty insolvencies and most of which are already subject to basic safety and soundness regulation under existing banking and securities law.

“Second, given the nature of the underlying assets involved—namely supplies of financial exchange and other financial instruments—there would seem to be little scope for market manipulation of the kind seen in traditional agricultural commodities, the supply of which is inherently limited and changeable.”

Has any economist ever gotten it so wrong?